Amanda Holden says going back to work so soon after giving birth stopped her "thinking about dying"

Amanda Holden nearly died when she gave birth to her second daughter Hollie (Image: PA)

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Amanda Holden has told for the first time why she decided to go back to work so soon after nearly dying in labour.

The Britain’s Got Talent judge almost lost her life giving birth to daughter Hollie in January 2012 – with her stint in intensive care coming 13 months after she gave birth to a stillborn son Theo.

Looking back, the actress puts her remarkable survival down to being “stubborn” – just like all the women in her family.

But her critics, including thousands of women on Mumsnet, were outraged at her return to the BGT judging panel just days later.

The mother-of-two, who also has a seven-year-old daughter, Lexi, with her record producer husband Chris Hughes, had to contend with hurtful comments, including one that read: “Spending time with your newborn is way more important than some s****y talent show.”

But for Amanda, 42, there was a very poignant reason to go back.

She says: “I was in intensive care for four days and almost died. I got myself home and I didn’t want to think about dying any more.

“One day Lexi came home from school and was appalled I was still in my pyjamas. I knew I had to pick myself up and pull myself out of it.

“My body was really swollen. I looked like a rugby player and she had seen me with tubes coming out of me, it was all really hideous.

Amanda returned to work as BGT judge soon after her near-death experience (Image: Rex)

“We protected her from most of the horrors of it. But the normality for her was to see me go back to work and I thought, ‘I am going back’.

“There was one night I went back, and Chris and I were able to forget all the devastation, get on a train have a quiet journey to Edinburgh, do the show and come home.

“I took Hollie to Birmingham about two weeks later. It was the last place I felt my baby son kick me, which was the 31st of January.

“On the 1st of February I was told he was going to be stillborn and I had come back from Birmingham that night. I wanted to do that journey, coming back to the place with a baby in my arms and that is no word of a lie.

“If it had been Manchester I would have given Hollie to my mum and not put her in the car for that long journey – it was because it was Birmingham.

“I believe in circles, I believe that was what was meant to be. I came back to where I started.”

Amanda says she felt compelled to write her autobiography, No Holding Back, so her children knew her real story.

Amanda is mother to Alexa, six, and 21-month-old Hollie (Image: Wenn)

She admits he was asked for years to write it, but felt her life at that point had been very much based on her first marriage to comedian Les Dennis and her very public affair with actor Neil Morrissey.

“I thought it was a shallow, awful part of my life, all played out publicly. Why bring out a book? Then subsequently my life changed.

"Loads of amazing things happened. I found Chris, I had my children, everyone knows my journey with having children has been pretty fraught.

"It sounds so dramatic but I suppose the fact that I nearly died and wouldn’t have been around to tell my story made me rethink it.

“I was thinking, ‘If I had died, my mum’s version of my story wouldn’t be mine, Chris’s wouldn’t, my sister wouldn’t be able to tell it’.

"There is no one but me that can do it, so I did it for my children. But I really don’t want them to read it until they are about 15.

"There are about two swear words. I changed lots of them thinking, ‘Lexi and Hollie will see this – and Mummy never swears’.”